Limited Edition Red Vinyl on 180 Gram Vinyl!

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Rum, Sodomy & The Lash is the second studio album by British celtic / folk punk band The Pogues, released in August 1985 by Stiff Records.

The album's title is taken from a quotation attributed to Winston Churchill: "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash." The title was suggested by drummer Andrew Ranken, who said "it seemed to sum up life in our band". The cover artwork is based on the painting “The Raft Of The Medusa”, Théodore Géricault’s, mythical reinterpretation of the true story of shipwrecked survivors reduced to cannibalism, with the band members' faces replacing those of the men on the raft.

Rum Sodomy & The Lash, is anchored in Irish traditional music’s love of tragedy and sentiment, encompassing the piss-soaked streets of Kilburn and Soho, the shell-pocked shores of Gallipoli, and hazy memories of a pastoral Ireland that may never have existed.

The shipwreck imagery is appropriate to the stories of abandonment, struggle. In The Old Main Drag, MacGowan’s opening line evokes a dark antithesis to the Dick Whittington tale of escaping poverty. There’s an allusion to a certain grace bestowed to even the grimmest of scenarios by retaining a sense of aesthetics.

Despite the degradation and the squalor, the characters’ humanity never disappears thanks to the weaving of adapted traditional songs and original material, and the band’s unassuming musical skills which lend an authentic rhythm to the original songs while punching-up the traditional ballads such as Jesse James.

Such tracks, whether about the plight of immigrant workers in Navigator or the abandoned pregnant girl in The Gentleman Soldier, work because their folk qualities make the suffering they describe seem authentic.

The album’s shifting between different moods and tenses was what struck so many when it was released in the 1980s and is why Rum Sodomy & The Lash is considered a classic album.

This LP on limited red 180 gram heavyweight vinyl with a printed inner sleeve is pressed in Europe.